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What's wild about the Matt Cooke incident is that Cooke was never suspensed.
With Matt Cooke, there is at least a plausible explanation that it was a typical attempt at a typical play that ended up being screwed up as a huge outlier. Going into the boards like that, it's extremely common to "ride" the opponent into the boards. You're not trying to lay a huge hit on their upper body; that would be boarding and illegal. Your main decision is, do you 1) Hold back, not really make contact at all, and then try to read whether they break left/right so that you can follow them, or 2) Ride them into the boards and try to control their body so that they can't break left/right in an attempt to get around you. (2) happens all the time, and usually without incident. The typical thing to do when you have someone against the boards and don't want to let them escape in either direction is to pin your knee hard against the boards, right between their legs. You raise it up a little bit; it's like up in their crotch. Your plant foot is literally pushing your knee hard into the boards. To explain why this is effective, imagine being the offensive player. You can't cross your feet over to turn in either direction. You can't push off hard in either direction. They're literally preventing your legs from being effective at moving your body laterally. Typically, the goal of the offensive player is to use their arms to push as hard as they can against the boards, moving the defender a foot or two away from the boards, so that you again have room to maneuver. I have personally played this exact situation hundreds of times, and as a defenseman, I was usually in the role of trying to control the offensive player's body, but I have definitely done both sides in drills. I've done it as the offensive player against guys who are much larger than me, and can viscerally tell you how hard you have to push against the boards to get them to move a few inches in order to give you room to make a break in one direction or the other (or even just room to get your stick/foot on the puck to slip it out to one side or the other to your teammate).
Matt Cooke's knee may have been a little bit of an outlier high as he was trying to ride, and he obviously got his skate not directly between Karlsson's legs, up above the tendon guard and off to the side too much. Was it in part because Karlsson was already trying to change directions, and Cooke didn't read it/couldn't follow in time? Was it that Cooke is a criminal who found a way to cleverly disguise his criminal intent? Who flippin' knows. But the whole thing is actually so close to a legit hockey play that I would be likely to believe the result of the league's investigation, especially considering Cooke's reputation and Karlsson's value to the league. All the pressure would be to finding guilt of intentionality if at all possible.
I didn't look super long, but I didn't find a video that showed this whole thing in its entirety. They were all cut to miss a lot of the critical portion. However, skates almost never come up anywhere near that high unless someone completely blows a tire and completely loses control of their body. Would a better video show me that dude actually was just trying super hard to change directions, blew a tire, completely lost his balance/control of his body, and went flying head over heels? Possibly. But you almost never see anything that looks remotely like that in any regular play, not even examples of guys who look silly because they get juked out of their shorts and completely topple (away from any necks). I would expect an investigation would look into all of this, including questions like, "Did he play an outsided number of minutes so far in the game; was he super late on a shift?" If dude was just extra gassed, it's possible that he really did just completely lose it, trying to change directions in a way that he would normally be able to do, but just wasn't capable of at that time, and completely sillyfied himself. Who knows.
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